The OpenDaylight Project, a community-led and industry-supported open source platform to advance -defined networking (SDN) and network functions (NFV), is offering a product it thinks is ready for prime time. Hydrogen is officially available for download.

“OpenDaylight formed with the goal of tackling one of IT’s toughest challenges: simplifying network management,” said David Meyer, Technical Steering Committee chair at OpenDaylight. “This first release is a great step forward and the community is already looking to build on its work to address a variety of additional capabilities and features in subsequent releases that are being discussed at the first OpenDaylight Summit this week.”

Three SDN Flavors

With over a million lines of code, Hydrogen is the first simultaneous release of OpenDaylight delivering three different editions to help a wide array of users get up and running as quickly as possible -- Base Edition, Virtualization Edition and Service Provider Edition.

Hydrogen Base Edition is for those who are exploring SDN and OpenFlow for proof-of-concepts or academic initiatives in physical or virtual environments. Hydrogen Virtualization Edition for data centers includes all the components of Base plus functionality for creating and managing Virtual Tenant Networks and virtual overlays, and includes applications for and network management.

Finally, Service Provider Edition is for providers and carriers who manage existing networks and want to plot a path to SDN and NFV. It includes Base plus protocol support commonly encountered in service provider networks, as well as security and network management applications.

“We are seeing new OpenDaylight implementations and solutions coming to the forefront every day,” said Neela Jacques, executive director at OpenDaylight. “All signs point to 2014 being a key year for the project as we continue to grow the community, build the architecture and engage with organizations and end users who want to accelerate the path to SDN and NFV.”

, IBM Play Nice

We caught up with Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, to get his take on the latest effort from OpenDaylight. He told us IBM is smack dab in the middle of the Hydrogen effort, which is the first major step for OpenDaylight.

“Cisco has a greed to participate in OpenDaylight and to make its own switches compatible with the new standard. That’s a pretty big deal. Like most major vendors, Cisco has attempted to craft a path in SDN that will benefit its own proprietary code base and customer base,” King said.

“That’s a natural in this rapidly changing environment. But the association of IBM with OpenFlow, of which OpenDaylight is an offshoot, and the fact that Cisco is a major IBM partner and coexists in a lot of data centers brought Cisco to the table. Cisco realizes that if this is going to move forward with IBM pushing it they better get on board.”